Remember reliability, not just immediacy of breaking news

Covering breaking news on the so-called 24-hour news cycle has always been fraught with certain perils. It was challenge enough before the turn of the century, when in most cases the only media were three major television networks and a handful of local TV and radio stations. The surge of 24-hour television news in the 1980s and ’90s brought new pressures, and the later advent of the Internet turned all of us, even daily newspapers, into outlets where it wasn’t just information that was valuable but immediate information.

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